Dirt by David Vann: review

David Vann's 'Dirt' is a pitch-perfect, unflinching exploration of a family’s
brutal infighting

By Beth Jones

7:00AM BST 28 Jun 2012

In the final pages of David Vann’s 2009 debut novel, Legend of a Suicide, the narrator returns to his Alaskan childhood home hoping “my dead father and his suicide and his cheating and his lies and my pity for him, also, might finally be put to rest”. But nothing is as he remembers.

The towering cherry tree on which he’d played is “narrow and unimpressive” and the tall fence just waist height. Centred, much like his follow-up novelCaribou Island, around Vann’s own family history, the book played with the ways in which the past can be transformed into fiction and how memories, “often all that a life or a self is built on”, are themselves ever-shifting narratives.

It’s a theme to which he returns in his latest novel, Dirt. In sun-soaked California, Galen, a 22-year-old virgin, lives with his mother in a decrepit family estate where a battle is being waged, not only for a substantial inheritance, but also for the past. His mother, dressed in flowing white, shores up her world with childhood memories of lemonade-drinking, cucumber-sandwich-filled afternoons, while his aunt demolishes them with her own recollections of Galen’s ruthlessly violent grandfather.

Galen, when not reading The Prophet or succumbing to Hustler magazine, is trapped between their conflicting versions of his family past: “His mother couldn’t be trusted, because she was trying too hard to protect and deny. His aunt couldn’t be trusted because she was trying too hard to destroy.” Vann’s rendering of the everyday gratings of family life is pitch-perfect. But he’s never shied away from the brutal and so the endless cycle of small family hurts is escalated into hatred and violence as Galen, his mother, aunt and cousin pit themselves against one another in an outlandish, horrifying and apocalyptic battle.

Galen is motivated by the need to escape from himself and “to wipe his mind free of memory”. Fighting amid the estate’s fig trees as if in his own distorted Garden of Eden, Galen believes himself to be, not a hygienically challenged underachiever, but a shamanic warrior and his story, although less engaging than Vann’s previous fictions, is, none the less, a well-written, unflinching exploration of the often terrifying chasm between who we want to be, and who we actually are.